WRESTLING
EVIL When you are young, you are immortal. Death is remote and impersonal; it comes to the old and the sick, to the characters of fiction and of history. It does not come where you live. But when it does, it shatters your invincibility and confronts you with your own mortality and the reality of evil in the world. This past month Kutztown University student Kyle Quinn was murdered on Main Street by three young men from Allentown in a random act of violence committed after they had been drinking. The fact that these thugs picked an innocent man, a poet and musician, who was non-confrontational, and beat him to death only compounds the tragedy and raises the question of how one is supposed to act in the face of overwhelming evil. The event has shattered the college community and broken the illusion of a peaceful village. There is an out-pouring of grief as students seek to deal with emotions that they never expected to surface in their young lives. Residents of the borough struggle with the impact of the murder on their own lives and that of their children. The world has intruded upon us with all its brutality and viciousness. What do we do about it? Certainly the killings at Virginia Tech and the slaying of the Amish children in Lancaster County within the past twelve months may be more horrific in their magnitude and examples of the culture of violence that permeates our lives. Once again we are challenged to make sense out of something that is so senseless, to understand the nature of grace in a world that constantly tests our capacity to forgive, and to find comfort in the arms of a loving God who does not seem to shelter all of his children. We wrestle with evil everyday, with the principalities and powers at work on this planet, and with its manifestations in our own lives and in the people close to us. Sometimes evil is overwhelming; most of the time it is simply annoying. Sometimes it can be forgotten and relegated to deeper crevices of our minds, but sometimes, like this latest tragedy, we cannot ignore it. It is precisely in these times that must examine the meaning of our Christian faith and what it means to trust in a God who summons us to walk difficult paths. There is a new school year beginning at Kutztown University. There is a new year of worship, learning, social interaction at St. John's. It will be different for both communities, and for the larger community of which we are all a part. We need to learn to live with each other, to put aside the feelings of anger, resentment, distrust, and become the people that God wants us to be. Forgiveness is hard; love is hard; acceptance of one another is hard. But we need to keep trying. That is the nature of grace. That is the essence of divine love. It will not come simply by wishing for it, but by addressing the questions, confronting the realities, by prayer and spiritual renewal, by trusting the love of God that is in each of us. May God grant us the grace to do that and be the Christ to each other.
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